Catacombs of Terror! (6 page)

“When have I ever fucked anything up?” I asked, pulling on my ‘I'm hurt' face. Kafka just stared back at me. He dug in his pocket and flicked me his press pass. He got up.

“I'll call you,” he said, and walked out into the rain. I stared blankly into space for a couple of minutes, and then I left, too.

I let myself into the office and checked my answerphone. More out of habit than anything else. It beeped and robot-voiced away while I poured a smallish whiskey and sat down. No messages. That was good. I lit a cigarette. The rain splattered against the window with a force that seemed close to anger. No messages, huh? I felt a small relief. So, I had a little time to think. Well. Okay. My plan was to get into the ScryTech CCTV control room. The city had plenty of their cameras around, swivelling and tracking events on the streets below. The idea was that the cameras deterred or prevented crime. The practical reality, I suspected, was entirely different. There had to be a reason why ScryTech and KHS had taken over significant chunks of the Area Council's operations at roughly the same time. ScryTech's stated job description was ‘data gathering.' Surveillance. Watching, recording. KHS's purpose was digging, excavating, revealing. The library was, I reasoned, a repository of data. Somewhere in this maze there was a centre, an objective. A purpose.

Something told me that whoever was behind all of this hadn't got what it was that they wanted. Or maybe they had. Maybe they had what they wanted, had it all along. But I was being thrust into events, for a reason that remained obscure. I had a hunch that, despite what I had said to Colin Kafka, I was about to fuck things up. And it wasn't my fault. Honestly. Swearing under my breath, I pulled Kafka's press pass from my inside pocket and set about duplicating it. It wasn't hard. It didn't need to be a perfect copy. I was only going to flash it and slide it back in my wallet.

Kafka's call came at 10:40
A.M
. I was ready. I'd already burnt a book of matches one by one, made lots of holes in a piece of A4 with the hole punch, and stared with blank eyes at the rain for a while.

“Martin? Have you done the press card?” Kafka sounded busy. Efficient. I grunted affirmatively. “Good. They'll want ID. I've set up an interview for ‘Bob Jones' at eleven thirty this morning. You've got half an hour because crime fighting is, as we all know, a full-time job. Don't ask wrong questions. Okay?”

“I'm indebted, Colin,” I spat. “What, exactly, constitutes a ‘wrong' question? Don't tell me. I know. One that might get you into trouble. Well, don't worry. You know me. But yeah, well, thanks. So where do I go to meet with ScryTech? And should I let you know what gives?”

“Do that, Martin. I'm hoping to get some sort of story out of this. Assuming you don't upset too many people. You'll meet a Council official called Mario Murnau in the lobby of City Hall.” He hung up.

I was punctual. I always am. My suit was still looking reasonably sharp, despite the drizzle I arrived in. I climbed the steps up to City Hall and pushed open the double doors. The lobby was spacious, all marble and Victorian civic ostentation. There was a secretary behind a lonely desk that looked tiny and out of place in the chilly vastness.

“My name's Bob Jones. From the paper. I'm supposed to be meeting Mario Murnau,” I said. I hoped I sounded polite. I couldn't tell. Well, yeah.

“I'll just page him. Is he expecting you?” Icy cold. Professional, I supposed. But not very welcoming. Well, yeah. What did I expect? Air kisses and a hug?

“I have an appointment for eleven thirty.”

“Well, it's only eleven twenty-five. Would you take a seat?”

I bit back a few choice words and sat down. I sat still and I looked around until I'd looked around about as much as I cared to. It wasn't very rewarding. Murnau turned up a quarter of an hour later. I got up and extended my hand, but he didn't seem to like the idea of shaking it. He walked towards the door. I followed.

“Bob Jones? I'm Murnau. I take it you're here to talk to the CCTV chappies.” Mario Murnau was tall, with horn-rimmed specs, and a polished, vaguely Etonian accent. His name sounded exotic, but he didn't look it. There was something a little odd about him, though. I couldn't quite tell what it was. We were outside now. The rain didn't surprise me. I was used to it. Murnau didn't like it at all. He hurriedly unlocked a black wrought-iron gate, and led me down some steps below the pavement. I'd never noticed them before.

“They live down here, Bob. The men behind our electronic eyes! Night and day, twenty-four hours, they never stop. Shifts, of course. Ah, could I just see your press card? Good, good. Have to be careful, you realise. Where was I? Yes, indeed, the system is never unattended. Never! Round the clock safety and peace of mind for the good citizens of our city, eh? Anyway, it's all pretty sensitive stuff, so I'll stay with you while you speak to the chappies. Don't mind me.”

We had entered a subterranean control room beneath City Hall. It seemed unnecessarily dark. There were banks of switches and two walls of TV monitors, both colour and black and white. Figures moved across them. I could recognise most of the locations. There was a reek of body odour and instant coffee in the stuffy atmosphere. Murnau took a couple of steps back into the murk of the corner of the room. He was proprietorial. Watchful. And not entirely at ease. There were three men scrutinising the screens, their faces lit up by them. One of them, a bulky crew-cut guy in some sort of pseudo military pullover, turned on his swivel chair and extended a meaty hand towards me.

“Morning. I'm Robinson. I take it you'd like to know a little about the system?” Robinson. No first name. He seemed friendly though. Almost keen. Probably welcomed the chance to see someone from outside. A reporter, no less.

“Bob Jones.” I shook his hand. His handshake was moist. Not too firm. I didn't like it. Handshakes are one of the things that I tend to judge people on. Not fair, I know. Yeah, well. Anyway.

“I'm from the paper. I'm working on a piece about twenty-first century crime and prevention. Credit card fraud, Internet scams, that sort of thing. Then moving on to DNA testing, ‘smart water,' and of course video surveillance. Which is where you guys come in. All right to smoke in here?” I had my cigarette already in my mouth.

“I'm afraid not, Bob,” said Murnau. I put my cigarette back in the packet.

“Well,” said Robinson, “basically, we inherited this system from Rentokil. The Council reviews the contract every three years. If everything's up to scratch, nothing changes. Or if another company offers a better deal than the current outfit, that's taken into consideration at the review. So we have to perform!” He laughed. Murnau laughed, too. Stage laughter, I thought. “We have a total of a hundred and two cameras in the central city area, and thirty-six in the suburbs, another thirty-six in local villages—”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, pulling a notebook from my bag. “This is exactly the kind of thing we need our readers to know. Peace of mind, and all that.” I scribbled down the figures.

“—so we have a total of one hundred seventy-four cameras operating in public areas. All of these cameras are highly visible. That's a requirement in the guidelines. No hidden cameras. Part of the point of them is to deter crime, as well as detect it. So visible cameras are part of the plot. Your criminal sees the camera and thinks again. Your criminal knows he's being watched. The knowledge that the cameras exist is enough to deter crime, at least in the first instance. Another part of the plot is that we don't want the surveillance to be seen as a covert, Big Brother–style operation. The cameras are friends to the law-abiding. It's your criminals who need to worry about them.”

He laughed again. He was an irritating guy, self-satisfied and smug. With a wet handshake. I carried on scribbling in my notebook. I noticed Murnau straining to read what I was writing without seeming to.

“One of the cameras' sidelines is that they look out for each other, too. Each camera is sited so that I can check the status of its neighbouring device.”

I was beginning to feel bored. I let the lecture drift on, occasionally nodding or making an appreciative noise. I kept on writing in my book. I knew all this anyway. Standard surveillance industry crap. Everything was smothered in layers of assurance that it was all for the public good. Old-fashioned crime-fighting Dixon-of-Dock-Green sweet-talk. I thought I might as well throw a small spanner into his spiel. Test out a little suspicion of mine.

“So how much money does KHS earn from the contract?” I asked.

“I'm afraid that information is classified,” butted in Murnau. He looked at me sharply. “Standard business practice, of course. A company is under no obligation to reveal its finances to anyone other than the Inland Revenue.”

“Of course,” I concurred. Interesting. Murnau had responded quickly, but perhaps too quickly to notice exactly what I had said.

“Well, that's the background. Anything specific you'd like to ask?” said Robinson.

“That seems to have covered almost everything I need for the article. But I would like to see the cameras in action from here. Would that be possible?”

“Certainly. Take a seat.” Robinson got up, while Murnau shifted, uncomfortably I thought, from foot to foot in the shadows. “Now, just take a look at that monitor there. General view down this street, one of our prime retail areas. Okay. Let's just zoom in . . . .” The view on the monitor barrelled down the street, to focus with astonishing clarity on a man standing at a junction at the end.

“That's incredible,” I said. I meant it. Apart from the fact that for once it wasn't raining. The camera had zoomed in on a face maybe two hundred and fifty metres away. You could see the guy's moustache. His glasses. You could practically tell how long ago he'd shaved his chin.

“And watch
this
,” gushed Robinson. He was proud of the hardware. “I'll just take a still . . . .” There was an audible click from somewhere inside the control desk, and the image froze. “Now what we can do is check this bloke's face on our database . . . .” Faces scrolled down the screen impossibly fast, dozens and dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. In just a few seconds the original still returned with the words NO MATCH emblazoned over it. “So there you have it. Visual mapping. His face has just been compared to all the criminals—convicted or otherwise—in our system archives. He's clear. No record. Well, not as far as we know. But if we have any reason to be suspicious, we can e-mail his mugshot to the central police archives, and they'll do a nationwide search. There's no hiding place for crooks in our city.”

I was absolutely horrified.

“That's quite something,” I said. “Very impressive. No hiding place for crooks in our city, hey? Might make a decent headline.” Robinson glowed with pride. “Would it be all right to have a photographer come down, take a few pictures of you guys at work, in front of all the monitors?” I pretty much knew this would be refused, but I liked to tease. Robinson was thinking he was going to be famous. Of course, Murnau put the cosh on the notion immediately.

“I'm afraid that won't be possible, Bob,” he interjected firmly from the gloom behind us. “We cannot put our chappies at risk from criminals who may have been convicted on the strength of video evidence. No, photography is completely out of the question. And no names must be used in your piece. We will naturally need to check it over before publication.”

Robinson looked a little downcast. He was going to have to wait a while longer for his fifteen minutes of fame. I smiled inwardly. It was fine for these legitimised voyeurs to film, photograph, and file unknowing Joe and Jane Publics. But not okay for the process to be reversed. Yeah, well.

“What a shame. A photo's always nice to accompany blocks of text. But never mind. There's a couple of things I'd like to know, just to wrap things up. Do you have a map—a plan—of the areas covered by the cameras that I could look at? We will need some sort of graphic, if a photo's not possible. And do you have any plans to extend the network?”

“I can get you a map. One moment. And no, there are no plans to extend the network at present.” Robinson was terse. Back to anonymity for you, friend. Being an unknown's not so bad though. And it looked from the technology in the room that anonymity was getting to be a rare thing. Getting rarer every day. A machine across the way, where Murnau was standing, purred quietly for a few seconds, then I was passed an A4 sheet.

“I'll show you out,” said Murnau briskly. I'd had my allotted thirty minutes. I said my goodbyes to the ‘chappies' and followed Murnau back up the steps, glad to breathe fresh air, if not so pleased to feel the rain on my face.

“Bloody weather,” muttered Murnau under his breath.

“Must be quite a strange occupation,” I said. “Watching telly all day in a basement.”

“ScryTech do a very good job indeed. You'd be very surprised what we see.” A policeman passed us on the steps. Murnau nodded curtly to him.

“Well, thanks very much for your time,” I smiled. “It's been
very
interesting.”

“Not a problem. Always happy to talk to our illustrious local newspaper. When will your piece appear? I expect Robinson would like to see it.”

I bet he would, I thought.

“Oh, some time soon. Next week or so,” I answered breezily. Don't hold your breath, Murnau. Don't wait up, Robinson.

“Goodbye then, Bob.”

“Bye.”

It was just after midday. Town was packed. Shoppers and tourists everywhere, despite the rain and the wind. I glanced up. A black CCTV camera swivelled idly towards me, twenty feet above the crowds. Here's to you, Mister Robinson, I thought. I barged through the hordes back towards my office. I was definitely interested in the fact that Mario Murnau hadn't noticed my use of
‘
KHS' instead of ‘ScryTech' when I'd asked him about the financing. Maybe I was even intrigued. A little idea about the relationship between KHS and ScryTech had germinated, and now it was growing fast. Like a fungus.